Content providers have long struggled with how to provide content at a high availability and high performance to their customers in view of bandwidth limitations in content distribution networks. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) can be a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers connected to the Internet or other public/private communication network. The goal of a CDN is to serve media content (e.g., video/audio/etc.) to User Equipment nodes (UEs) with high availability and high performance. Example UEs that can receive media content are set-top-boxes, television, multimedia computers, and wireless terminals (e.g., smart phones and tablet computers).
The bandwidth requirements for distributing content from content providers to central CDN servers and/or to distributed Edge replication servers have grown tremendously with the proliferation of adaptive streaming content delivery solutions. Adaptive streaming technology is being implemented to handle increasing consumer demands for streaming content from Over The Top (OTT) applications on OTT content servers (e.g., broadcast and on demand movies/TV etc.) across one or more CDNs to UEs having widely differing performance and protocols. Example adaptive streaming technology that continues to be developed includes Apple initiated HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol, Microsoft initiated Smooth Streaming (SS) over HTTP protocol, Adobe initiated Dynamic Streaming protocol, and MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG DASH) protocol, etc.
Adaptive streaming technology converts a source media content stream into a plurality of content streams having different coding bit rates. A group of multiple bit rate content streams may be transcoded to provide a plurality of groups of multiple bit rate content streams having different distribution container formats that can be required by different streaming protocols used by UEs (e.g., HLS protocol, Smooth Streaming protocol, Dynamic Streaming protocol, MPEG DASH protocol, etc.). Accordingly, a single group of multiple bitrate content streams can result in numerous groups of differently formatted multiple bit rate content streams that need to be distributed and stored at a central CDN server and/or distributed to Edge replication servers to enable high availability and high performance delivery to many different types of UEs.
An example adaptive streaming server system may be configured to accept media content from live sources and/or static file sources, e.g., online content providers such as Hulu®, Netflix®, YouTube®, or Amazon® Prime, etc. Media content from live sources may comprise live programming captured relative to any type of event, e.g., sporting/entertainment/gaming events, concerts, live TV shows, live news broadcasting, etc.
In the context of digital content delivery, such as OTT delivery of video content, there are typically entitlements associated with a given content title, user, device, location, etc. Traditional content protection or Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems support a small number of such entitlements, such as play count, expiration time and output controls, embedding these entitlements into licenses delivered to individual clients. These schemes fall short and are unable to properly support modern online video services, which include not only Video-On-Demand (VOD) but also live programming, with complex business rules.